The Aphelion
by Ayumu Kasuga
Summary: written as an answer to dn contest@LJcomm's prompt "lolita". contains references to the novel, and lots of astronomy babble.


**Author's Notes:** I think it's been a very long time since I've written anything- as eyes rove over this little note, I'm dusting the cobwebs off of "Riddle Me This". I'm afraid that I've been very bad at updating, even though chapter seven has been sitting on my hard drive for a while. But since RL's little fit has passed, I'll be updating now. :) I'm very happy to post this, the result of me changing styles a bit, experimenting with prose and science.

* * *

He used to think his breath was exhaled out past the atmosphere, the stratosphere, straight into the Sun's chromosphere and beyond. The cosmos welcomed the molecules his lungs pushed out, and photons would dance as the fused neutrinos would greet the emission, soon to be crushed by supernovae compression waves.

Roving eyes take in every detail, each image imprinted and his retinas would nearly burn with the knowledge he took, the quiet scenery stolen from the countryside, to make it his own. He would take the stars and know them by name (Alpha Centauri to Vega, Altair to Rigel and Procyon B), their years in comparison to his own, quiet and solemn and strong in their silent age. The heavens would take his eyes one day, pluck them out and place them with Orion's corpse, dead and reposed past the ecliptic and near galaxies. He would be able to see the world in all its glory, its pathetic aura and quiet presence overpowered (by the beauty of the heavens) and stripped naked to what it really was...

(Blink).

Twice, and God realizes his throat is dry. There's a bottle of water, and He idly remembers that water is a byproduct made while mitochondrion create adenosine triphosphate, that God doesn't need water because He already has it- so there's no need to drink. (the stars don't need it either, the stars don't drink water because there's no compulsive need to consume it like they do with hyrogen. they are self-sufficient, they create energy by burning hydrogen at over four million kelvin)

What beauty I have, says God (He is all-knowing in his power, in his strength and immortality)

To appreciate beauty is human, a quality that God has given up in order to become one of the great, one to bypass magnetic fields and keep the secret of black holes to himself. But _she_ is human, she is human and she (feels happy everyday Light comes to see her! he remembers) smiles and laughs and hangs on people's arms when they try to walk. She is not fragile, because using that term would denote that God cared- but he remembers that she danced

(to a movement that even the stars do not know).

Someday, God thinks, I will kill this creature like the half-dead protostars, left breathless without their gravitational accretion and weak smiles (and their hair left golden like the low-mass main sequence stars). She was so young in comparison to his agelessness, his youth, his immortality and his power (long live Lord Kira forever).

It gives you such satisfaction to see them die, those interfaced with emotion and dragged down by age. You even chose a substitute at one point, someone with golden hair and still rife with feelings. The boy was remarkable, for (there were many scars- he was so human, unlike the interstellar matter that wove in with the nebulae) he became Rita, mirroring God's want. But in the boy there was anger, and it was an emotion that God knew, and He knew that it needed to die.

Mihael Keehl (Rita, angry and scarred and not-so-beautiful) died (rested among the black dwarfs and the dying planetary nebulae) when God willed it, and it had happened. Just as he'd planned. But _she_ stayed, and her hair was still brighter than Canopus in its ascending glory.

She, God discovers, is (not the fire of the Sun's convection zone) no more than a little girl, but one that seeps into his immortal memory like the stained, bloodied throwaways of yesterday. She is the youth that his binary system evolves around, God and Kira linked by gravity and circling around the wanted (not needed, because God does not want for anything) flesh and bone that he claims for his own, in His own time.

Being found was something that came upon God like the density waves of a Type I core-collapse supernova, left in the world's shame and the photons left behind. It interrupted his hunt, and his binary system broke open and unleashed the gravity that attracted Kira and God together out (away, their inertia carrying them off onto different orbits).

God died on a Thursday, and realized that in his power, He had aged. He kept in His memory the thoughts of his immortality (gone, whisked away like the quasars trapped in Seyfert galaxies). He became nonstellar, by nature becoming what he hated most (human, like the girl he couldn't keep away, off his mind). There was silence, left to keep record of the galaxies and the cosmological redshift, none other to pluck his eyes and carry them to plant on a distant singularity...

(even Lord Kira himself, knowledgable in the ways of dark matter and radiation darkening, had suffered the illness that he had hated most, the greatest sign that marked the difference between humans and God.) the irrational fear of 'death', that had given him the power over Man and weak things of the expanding universe, had claimed him for its own when his immortal (so He had thought) heart had suffered (collapsing like the hydrogen-starved core of a blue giant).

God was dead- and He could not hear the gentle, wordless cries of the cosmos. He could not see the tears left unshed in His wake, and he did not feel the (rest in peace-) soft, blonde strands that had been hiding the (most human) gentle (corrupt) face that He had ever ignored.


End file.
